Students in Professor Hillary Mushkin’s media arts seminar (E/H/Art 89 New Media Arts in the 20th and 21st Centuries) displayed and discussed their projects at a recent campus event. The projects used a variety of approaches to explore cyberspace, gaming, the internet, and privacy. [List of projects]

Harold Rosen (PhD '51, Electrical Engineering), the father of geostationary satellite communications, passed away on January 30, 2017. His Caltech education, he told a Caltech publication in 2012, "gave me such a good grounding in the fundamentals" that he felt capable of attacking any technical problem in almost any field. [Caltech story] [Video of Dr. Rosen’s Presentation at EE Centennial]

P. P. Vaidyanathan, Professor of Electrical Engineering, has been selected to received the IEEE Signal Processing Society's highest award called the "Society Award" for his pioneering contributions to signal processing theory and education. The award honors outstanding technical contributions in a field within the scope of the Signal Processing Society and outstanding leadership within that field. [List of 2016 awardees] [Caltech story]

Pietro Perona, Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering, and colleagues have developed the Merlin Bird Photo ID mobile app which uses machine-learning technology to identify hundreds of North American bird species it "sees" in photos. "This app is the culmination of seven years of our students' hard work and is propelled by the tremendous progress that computer-vision and machine-learning scientists are making around the world," says Professor Perona. "A machine that recognizes objects in images, like humans do, was a distant dream when I was a graduate student and now it's finally happening." [Caltech story]

Yu-Chong Tai, Anna L. Rosen Professor of Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering; Executive Officer for Medical Engineering, has been named fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). He works on miniature biomedical devices including drug pumps, retinal implants, spinal cord implants, and more. He recently developed a device to count white blood cells that requires just a pinprick's worth of blood and processes samples in minutes. Election as an NAI fellow is an honor bestowed upon academic innovators and inventors who have "demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions and innovations that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society." [Caltech story] [NAI release]

Amnon Yariv, Martin and Eileen Summerfield Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Electrical Engineering , has been named fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). His research has focused on creating the mathematical tools and building blocks underpinning guided wave optics, the backbone of today's optoelectronic technologies. This endeavor led to the proposal and demonstration of the distributed feedback laser and started the field of optoelectronic integrated circuits. Election as an NAI fellow is an honor bestowed upon academic innovators and inventors who have "demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions and innovations that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society." [Caltech story] [NAI release]